Chip Gagnon

Chip Gagnon is Associate Professor of Politics at Ithaca College, and a long-time Visiting Scholar at Cornell University’s Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science, with a focus on International Relations, from Columbia University, where he also received certificates in Soviet/Russian Studies and East European Studies.  He is author of numerous articles as well was The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Cornell University Press, 2004), which was the winner of the  American Political Science Association’s award for Best Book on European Politics and Society, and co-winner of the Council for European Study’s Best First Book Award.  More recently he co-edited a volume, Post-Conflict Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Routledge, forthcoming July 2014) based on a series of workshops he organized at Cornell University.  His research has focused on violence that is framed as ethnic, in particular the ways in which such violence is often the result of an elite strategy of demobilization.   A  related research interest is the ways in which elites construct threatening images of the outside world as a domestic political resource.  Another  research project focuses on the concept of religious missionary work as a way to understand democracy promotion and other secular forms of international intervention, focusing in particular on the Balkans.